Hue-Distance Constrained Relative Radiometric Correction Considering the H–K Effect for Remote Sensing Images

Relative radiometric correction of multiple remote sensing images is essential for remote sensing data processing and its product generation. Due to the limitation of RGB color space, many existing RGB-based methods may have local radiance anomalies and strong dependence on reference images when dealing with dramatic radiance differences. Therefore, a hue-distance constrained relative radiometric correction method considering the Helmholtz–Kohlrausch effect (H–K effect) is proposed, by which the radiance differences of images can be corrected without the reference image to obtain better radiance consistency results. For the radiance anomalies in the correction process, the method in this article avoids the RGB color space limitation and minimizes the channel correlation in the correction process and optimizes the correction results by using the hue-distance to impose adaptive constraints on the correction process. Considering the influence of the H–K effect, the subjective visual perception of the human eye is introduced into the radiance correction of remote sensing images for the first time and the global perceptual lightness mapping is performed on the images, which extends the perceptual lightness mapping from pixel level to image level. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively eliminate the huge radiance differences in multiple remote sensing images, suppress the possible radiance anomalies, and obtain the correction results in line with the subjective perception of the human eye, which is of great help to the subsequent remote sensing processing.